Parody

Chaz Bono has starred in his own documentary ("Becoming Chaz"), appeared on reality TV (ABC's "Dancing With the Stars") and authored a book ("Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man"). He's now expanded his resume by appearing onstage in a short musical parody of the cult movie "Road House" at the Celebration Theatre near West Hollywood. "Road House: The Rock Opera" is a short -- about a half-hour long -- send-up of the 1989 Patrick Swayze movie. Bono plays the role of Tinker, originally played by actor John Young. A spokesperson for the stage production said that Bono sings in the show.

Rita Rudner is applying her comedic talent to the sale of her Dana Point beach house, and the result is a spot-on parody of a home marketing video. Her husband, director-writer Martin Bergman , featured the Monarch Bay home in the 2011 film "Thanks," in which Rudner acted. Now Rudner may have her own hit on her hands with the YouTube parody . In the farcical four-plus minutes, she promises to include one free facial tissue with the purchase of the five-bedroom, five-bathroom house, which is priced at $8.975 million.

In attacking the Internal Revenue Service for a training video parodying the TV show “Star Trek,” critics have not very boldly gone where many have gone before -- to a political universe in which government employees are pilloried for practices that are common in the private sector. You probably have heard that the IRS spent $60,000 to produce a video parodying the 1960s space opera, which spawned several spinoffs in movies and on TV. The video features the adventures of the "Starship Enterprise Y,” whose mission is to “seek out new tax forms, to explore strange new regulations, to boldly go where no governmental employee has gone before.” The stand-in for Capt.

"Star Trek" star William Shatner was not amused by a video parody of the television show that Internal Revenue Service workers produced at public expense. The actor, who appeared in the 1960s series as Captain James T. Kirk, used Twitter to give a thumbs down to the video, which reportedly cost $60,000. "So I watched that IRS video. I am appalled at the utter waste of US tax dollars," Shatner wrote to his more than 1 million Twitter followers. The Internal Revenue Service has apologized for spending taxpayer revenue on the six-minute video, which is attracting wide attention on the Internet.

A large meteor lit up the night sky across the East Coast, leading hundreds of dazzled spectators to report sightings in more than a dozen states. The event was not unusual but was widely reported because it happened across a populated area on a Friday night, said Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office. “There was a lot of people out and it got everyone's attention,” Cooke told the Los Angeles Times. The meteor was reported at about 8 p.m. EDT. It was probably the size of a boulder, about one yard across, and was bright enough to be classified as a fireball, Cooke said.

The first Steve Jobs movie will premiere next month, but it's not the film anyone expected. Funny or Die will release a parody biopic titled "iSteve" on April 15 on the Internet. It'll be the first of three movies based on the late Apple co-founder to be released. The movie will star Justin Long as Jobs. You might remember, of course, that Long was once a major part of Apple's marketing, playing the Mac in the "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials of the 2000s. The movie will run between 60 and 75 minutes long and be the longest project made to date by Funny or Die, a website that specializes in short parody videos that often feature well-known celebrities.

Dwight Howard proudly broke out his iPad Mini before the Lakers' battle against the Chicago Bulls on Sunday afternoon to share the Orlando Sentinel "Forget You" parody with those in the locker room. The Lakers visit the Magic on Tuesday, Howard's first return to Orlando since the trade last August. The video, released Thursday by the Sentinel, crudely animates current Magic players crooning to Howard. The Lakers center gave his compliments to the video's creators and singers.

It's no wonder that Luis Buñuel wanted to turn "The Monk" into a movie. Once banned, now merely cherished, the 1796 novel is a lurid amalgam of religious devotion and sin, earthly temptations and supernatural doings. Buñuel never made his movie, but there have been numerous adaptations. The latest, from French director Dominik Moll, is a work whose elegant atmospherics ultimately overwhelm the story, even with the terrific Vincent Cassel in the title role. Moll's version, arriving stateside almost two years after it opened in France, is a decided change of pace for the director of "With a Friend Like Harry" and new territory as well for Cassel.

Editor's note: This interview was conducted in Britain last summer, before the fate of Stevens' character was known. Dan Stevens was a virtual unknown before "Downton Abbey" premiered on PBS two years ago. But between the launch of the series and the premiere of Season 3, a lot changed for Stevens; the Cambridge grad became a heartthrob across the globe in the role of Matthew Crawley, a middle-class lawyer sucked into the gilded cage that is...

As the housing market collapsed in 2007, an analyst at Standard & Poor's composed a little tune for colleagues -- "Analyst D's" own version of "Burning Down the House" by the Talking Heads. The email, cited in the U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit against the ratings agency filed in Los Angeles late Monday, came in March 2007 after the analyst conducted a risk analysis of bonds packed with souring mortgages the previous year. "With apologies to David Byrne," the email began, "here's my version of 'Burning Down the House' Watch out Housing market went softer Cooling down Strong market is now much weaker Subprime is boi-ling o-ver Bringing down the house Hold tight CDO biz -- has a bother Hold tight Leveraged CDOs they were after Going -- all the way down, with Subprime mortgages Own it Hey you need a downgrade now Free-mont Huge delinquencies hit it now Two-thousand-and-six-vintage Bringing down the house.